Fortunately Pubmed speaks both English and American, if you search on Pubmed for necrotizing enterocolitis it also gives you articles about correctly spelt gut diseases in preterm infants as well. As a North American transplant my spelling has become a bit haphazard, so sometimes its hemoglobin sometimes haem…

Twins had intestinal colonization that was more like their co-twin than the unrelated babies. They were also more like their own mother’s breast milk microbiome than other breast milk. One of the babies developed NEC, and 5 days before that the microbial diversity became much less, and was then significantly less diverse than the co-twin. The co-twin also had an episode of getting antibiotics, which led to a smaller reduction in diversity which then recovered.

It seems from this new study that a baby’s gut colonization is strongly affected by the mother’s microbiome, particularly the microbiome of her milk, more than the environment of the NICU, but then we can really mess that up with antibiotics.